something that I have not yet seen discussed in the punching Nazis discussion

I am a woman, and I am queer. If the alt-right got the control they wanted, I would be affected.

I am also cis, straight-passing, middle-class, and, this one is majorly important, fucking white.

Most of the pearl-clutching I’ve seen over how we can’t POSSIBLY meet hate speech with violence, we can’t sink to their level, that makes us as bad as them, etc, etc - most of that is coming from white liberals.

And the thing is, fellow white people, is that this is on us.

You know who’s preaching this Neo-Nazi bullshit? White people. Do you know where this ‘philosophy’ came from, who developed it historically? White people. Do you know who fucked up basically the entire planet, spreading our racism, our homophobia, our sexism, our religious fundamentalism like a gods-damn virus everywhere we went, from North America to Africa to Japan?

White people.

We did this. We allowed it to happen. We invented it historically, we preached it historically, and even when a lot of us learned better, we allowed this shit to grow unmolested in various corners of our society. We even let it get into our governments and houses of law.

So we don’t get to flail and wail and wring our hands. We absolutely do not get to patronisingly, hypocritically chide the various minorities who respond to the hate and oppression we created and allowed and abet with hatred and violence, as if somehow their hate and violence is unjustified. As if we didn’t start it first. As if we haven’t turned our eyes aside, again and again and again, from those in our demographics who preach and act on hatred from positions of power.

You don’t get to criticize an abuse victim for finally hitting back.

The Neo-Nazis and alt-right are our fault, and they’re our responsibility to police and get rid of, because we’re the ones who share their privilege, we’re the ones who can confront and shut them down with the highest chances of success and from the positions of most safety. These are people who demonstrably can’t be reasoned with. It’s been tried. Sure, we can change our education system to promote empathy and enlightenment, but that’s a long-term solution that won’t fix any of the issues facing us right now.

“At The Still Hour Of Midnight The Graves Shall Open And A Vast Multitude Shall Rise”, 12"x16", gouache & watercolor on paper. This piece is sold but you can still visit the original at Nucleus Portland until June 22nd!

Wondering about these weird long titles on my pieces? Well, they’re all modified excerpts from a spooky book called “The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer” (published in 1899) which I pulled randomly off a shelf in the occult section of a used book store in Vancouver a couple weeks ago; the Brahan Seer was allegedly the invention of the author as no other record of him exists, but lines from the book are so metal I couldn’t resist using them as inspiration for the titles of a body of work about mystical animal revenge 🌸

There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. ‘Nou lèd, nou la,’ it says. 'We are ugly, but we are here.’ Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all odds, we exist.

—
Edwidge Danticat, “We Are Ugly, but We Are Here,” Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean

on this day, I would like to commemorate the extensive Jewish resistance that existed in almost every Nazi-occupied nation. from the streets of Warsaw, where Jewish resistance perplexed and bewildered the Nazis so much that a top German general lost his job because of it (and where we inadvertently inspired the Warsaw Uprising) to Sobibor, where Jews killed SS guards and burned a death camp to the ground, enraging the Nazis so much that they ordered the camp’s remains bulldozed into the ground, to Treblinka, where Jews escaped through the barbed wire into freedom and managed to survive to meet the Red Army the next year.

Jews did not go passively into the gas chambers. Abba Kovner, Mordechai Anielewicz, the Bielski brothers, and many others ensured that.

the image will always live in my mind: during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a Jewish man armed with a pistol approached General Jurgen Stroop’s command group and opened fire. Stroop’s bodyguard filled him with bullets, but he continued shooting until he collapsed. as Stroop walked over to gloat, he spat on Stroop’s shoes.

listen … this is so dan … this is SOOO!!! DAN!!!! just … acknowledging things without saying anything at all. i love him so much i’m actually crying right now wtf … i felt this way so often last year when he started casually talking about boys being cute in nearly every live show and video, when he made the sexuality comment in his diss track and dressed in fucking sequins and wore rhinestoned hats .. and i feel it again. he’s the king of just existing and having that be enough, no pomp and circumstance necessary. rejecting labels!! existing outside of the spectrums and the binaries!!!! resisting social categorization!!! refusing to be othered by a society that still always sees heterosexuality as the default and the norm. sometimes dan is lowkey the most rad. what a good dude. i love him <3

[Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada] argues that ‘any time Hawaiians—or any other native people, for that matter—come out in force to push for more respect for our culture and language or to protect our places from this kind of destruction, we are dismissed as relics of the past, unable to hack it in the modern world with our antiquated traditions and practices.

—
David Malie, Science, Time, and Mauna a Wākea: The Thirty-Meter Telescope’s Capitalist-Colonialist Violence, Part II

I hope y'all understand why I emphasize that I’m Transgender in my selfies - I have YET to see Punjabi CISgender people in Western media. My Punjabi Transgender community is even more marginalized.
SHOUT OUT TO MY PUNJABI TRANSGENDER/NONBINARY/INTERSEX FOLK, I LOVE YOU ALL, YOUR EXISTENCE MATTERS, YOUR EXISTENCE IS RESISTANCE, YOU ARE HISTORY IN THE MAKING 🔥✨🏳️‍🌈